4/9/26 WIP (Patreon)

I was trying to come up with a creative title, but I think if I force myself to do that every time I will eventually run myself into a corner and will have to be even more unfunny, so I think I will settle with being straightforward for now.

I got less done than I would like to, partly because of other things I have to do in life, but that will happen sometimes I suppose. Yesterday's still I think was a good test about the toon shading since it revealed a few things to me: the shaders on the characters are clearly toon shaders, but they still have some level of depth as they have some manually painted shading/blush on the skin with an image texture, which means that even though the simple toon shading in the background is closer to their styling it still requires some kind of baseline texture to exactly match the style. For this test, I used essentially the simplest form of toon shading directly on the background objects.

In the attached image, you can see the typical toon shading sharp divide between light and dark sections on Miku where the light is primarily on her face and top of chest, but there's additional shading around the shoulder, neck, and under breasts; this is very typical of most anime 3d characters where a certain amount of base shadows are done manually with baked textures, then an overlay of responsive shadows are cast on the rest of the body, but usually the rest of the lighting looks a bit different on the characters. When I review other 3d adult animators, I think what most of them do is have a realistic anime/hoyoverse shader then use high lighting contrast to make the characters stand out but retain less sharp lighting divides.

The other option (for chasing toon shading) is to make the shading on the characters even simpler, but the whole reason they don't have the full realistic anime/hoyoverse type shader already is because I don't have a deep grasp of Blender textures. I think I want the hoyoverse shading, but I won't know for sure until I actually do it. I will probably shelve any further developments until I have a better understanding/more comprehensive view of the situation so I don't make a lot of heuristic changes that might look worse and instead can have a better/cohesive look in the long run. I keep sprinting during this marathon, but I'm recognizing it, so I'll change my pace accordingly.

In a similar vein, I'm probably going to put most testing to the side for a bit so I can focus on making more as I feel like I'm behind a bit; I think I am still on track, but slower than I'd like to be. I am just going to focus on the next video until it's done then try some other things.

Also, I'm not sure I ever posted something with this scene? I've had this bedroom scene for a while and made a few things in it but nothing has ever some out yet because they were all unfinished or some technical problem stopped me from continuing. The BJ scene I was talking about a few weeks ago? That was with this scene and I had to stop because the mouth mechanism still wasn't working. I also started a short this week to more thoroughly test the hips physics (also in this scene) but EVERYTHING broke in that one. I might just want to make a new scene, I feel like it's cursed... it's definitely not because of my wacky workflow...

Thank you for supporting, I appreciate it more than you can know. I hope you have a good rest of your day!